«Sadie Barnette: Inheritance» presented by Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Opening November 20, Exploring Familial Archives within Extended Social Legacies

San Francisco, CA (October 14, 2021) – Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Sadie  Barnette: Inheritance, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from  November 20, 2021 to January 8, 2022. This new body of work uses installation, sculpture,  photography, wallpaper and large-scale drawing to examine the artist’s familial legacy.  Employing archival material–such as the 500-page dossier compiled by the FBI surveilling  her father, Rodney Barnette, during his time in the Black Panther Party–the artist wields  the personal nature of generational inheritance to inflect international political struggle  with urgency, collapsing temporal distinctions of past and present. The solo presentation  at the gallery runs simultaneously with the two-venue exhibition, Sadie Barnette: Legacy  and Legend, at Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art  Galleries, on view until December 18, 2021. It also coincides with the announcement of 

Barnette’s commission by Los Angeles International Airport and the L.A. Department of  Cultural Affairs to design a permanent site-specific artwork for a new plaza to be  completed in 2024, which will display the message «Sister You Are Welcome Here» in  brightly colored terrazzo lettering. 

Upon entering the exhibition, the initial site-line wall of the gallery is a sculptural depiction  of The New Eagle Creek Saloon, founded by Barnette’s father in the early 1990s as the  first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. The work is adorned with neon lights, and a  photograph of Sammy, a beloved patron and guest bartender, floats in a field of pink  glitter. High-femme aesthetics permeate the works throughout the show; signifiers such  as the color pink and glitter are used to re-invigorate archival material, escaping a binary  vision of gender and sexuality while celebrating the extant legacy and ongoing  resistance of the Black radical tradition. 

The exhibition also continues Barnette’s FBI Drawings series, examining the FBI’s  targeting of her father’s involvement in the Black Panther Party when he founded the  Compton chapter in California in 1968. This series takes scans of her father’s FBI file and  re-engineers individual pages, enlarging them to five by four feet and overlaying them  with exuberant, playful symbols such as flowers and the character Hello Kitty to  denigrate modes of empire, surveillance and power. Here, Barnette’s practice throws the  bracketing of a collective political past into crisis, shining a light on continued racial  injustice. The slow, labor-intensive act of making these drawings gives Barnette the time  to meditate on the bravery, politics, and the real lives of people who dared to change the  world. 

Barnette’s activation of everyday objects such as speakers, couches and domestic  interiors reveals their socio-political essence. In Home Good the artist references the  showy paint jobs of Bay Area car culture from her upbringing. Barnette uses these cars  as source material to conceptually address the generative act of creating something  grand and monolithic out of something ordinary. Similarly, the exhibition depicts a couch  covered in holographic vinyl against a wallpaper that repeats the word “sister” in a  patterned, geometric form. This repetition simultaneously creates a domestic space of  care while multiplying revolutionary acts and familial protection beyond any spatial  limitations. Though the artist’s personal history and experiences are directly referenced,  the political concepts of the works shimmer and leap beyond geography, time and  space. 

ABOUT SADIE BARNETTE  

Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University  of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio  Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the  Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in France. She has enjoyed  solo shows in the following public institutions: ICA Los Angeles, CA; The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; MCA San Diego, CA; Cantor  Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; and the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis, CA.  Her work is in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA;  Brooklyn Museum, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Guggenheim Museum, NY; JP Morgan  Chase Collection; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Orlando,  FL; San José Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; and the Berkeley Art  Museum, CA. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA. 

ABOUT JESSICA SILVERMAN  

Jessica Silverman is an ambitious, innovative, and internationally renowned contemporary  art gallery with a reputation for curating compelling exhibitions, building artists’ careers,  and collaborating with collectors who are keen on positive provenance. 

Silverman founded her eponymous gallery in 2008 after obtaining an MA in Curatorial  Practice from San Francisco’s California College of the Arts on the heels of a BFA from  Otis College in Los Angeles. Silverman sat on the San Francisco Arts Commission for nine  years. She is a founding member of 8-bridges, a member of the Art Dealers Association  of America (ADAA) and a member of the Selection Committee of Expo Chicago. The  gallery represents prominent Californian and international artists at all stages of their  careers. Works by the gallery’s artists have been acquired by museums all over the world  including Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Reina Sofia (Madrid), MoMA (New York),  MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture  Center (Dallas), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, the Art  Gallery of Ontario, not to mention SFMOMA and the De Young Museum (San Francisco).